Dear R and hydrological/environmental community, A major release of hydroPSO is now available on CRAN. This new release: -) implements the Standard Particle Swarm 2011 (SPSO-2011) -) is parallel-capable, to alleviate the computational burden of complex models with "long" execution time -) has an improved performance (33% - 38% faster) -) allows normalization, when the parameter space is not a hypercube -) includes seven new benchmark functions -) includes two new functions for importing/exporting from/to PEST -) handles models with sub-daily time step and with sub-daily observations -) has a new vignette -) computes the normalised swarm radius using the median distance of all the particles to the global best (instead of using the maximum distance) hydroPSO is a global optimization R package implementing a state-of-the-art version of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. hydroPSO can be used as a replacement of 'optim' for (global) optimization of non-smooth and non-linear functions. However, the main focus of hydroPSO is the calibration of environmental and other real-world models that need to be executed from the system console. hydroPSO is model-independent, allowing the user to easily interface any computer simulation model with the calibration engine (PSO). hydroPSO communicates with the model through the model's own input and output files, without requiring access to the model's source code. Several PSO variants and controlling options are included to fine-tune the performance of the calibration engine to different calibration problems. An advanced sensitivity analysis function together with user-friendly plotting summaries facilitates the interpretation and assessment of the optimization/calibration results. -o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- hydroPSO 0.3-0 is already available on CRAN: cran.r-project.org/web/packages/hydroPSO -o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- This package includes a vignette (tutorial) showing how to calibrate SWAT-2005 (swatmodel.tamu.edu/software/swat-model) and MODFLOW-2005 (water.usgs.gov/nrp/gwsoftware/modflow2005/modflow2005.html) for real-world case studies. You can download the vignette and all the files required to follow the two case studies from: rforge.net/hydroPSO For assistance/bugs, comments, and/or collaboration do not hesitate to contact the authors (in English, Spanish or Italian): Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini <mzb.devel [at] gmail.com> Rodrigo Rojas <Rodrigo.RojasMujica [at] gmail.com> Kind regards, Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini, Ph.D -- =====================================Water Resources Unit Institute for Environment and Sustainability Joint Research Centre, European Commission webinfo : floods.jrc.ec.europa.eu =====================================DISCLAIMER:\ "The views expressed are purely those of th...{{dropped:11}}